Contents
- Early Life
- Marilyn Monroe’s Entrance into Modeling and Acting
- Marilyn Monroe’s Some 28 Movies Made
- Marilyn Asked Joe DiMaggio for Help Just Before Her Death
- As We Say Goodbye to Marilyn, We Remember Her Last Hours
Early Life
Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson at the Los Angeles County Hospital on June 1, 1926 as the third child of Gladys Pearl Baker. Gladys was mentally and financially unprepared for a child, and soon after the birth she was able to place her daughter with foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender in the rural town of Hawthorne. At first, Gladys lived with the Bolenders and commuted to work in Los Angeles.
By the summer of 1933 Gladys felt stable enough for Monroe to move in with her and bought a small house in Hollywood, and shared it with lodgers, actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter. Months later, in January 1934, Gladys had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After several months in a rest home, she was committed to the Metropolitan State Hospital. She spent the rest of her life in and out of hospitals and was rarely in contact with Monroe.
Monroe became a ward of the state, and her mother’s friend, Grace McKee Goddard, took responsibility over her and her mother’s affairs. In the following four years, she lived with several foster families and often switched schools. While living with the Atkinsons; she was sexually abused, noted as always a shy girl, she now also developed a stutter and became withdrawn.
In the summer of 1935, she briefly stayed with Grace and her new husband Erwin “Doc” Goddard until Grace had to placed her in the Los Angeles Orphans Home in Hollywood in September 1935. While the orphanage was “a model institution” and was described in positive terms by her peers, Monroe found being placed there traumatizing, as to her “it seemed that no one wanted me”.
Encouraged by the orphanage staff who thought that Monroe would be happier living in a family, Grace became her legal guardian in 1936, although she was not able to take her out of the orphanage until the summer of 1937. Monroe had a second stay with the Goddards, but it lasted only a few months because Doc molested her.
After staying with several of her relatives and Grace’s friends and relatives in Los Angeles and Compton, Monroe found a more permanent home in September 1938, when she began living with Grace’s aunt, Ana Atchinson Lower, she was enrolled in Emerson Junior High School and was taken to weekly Christian Science services.
With Lower, Monroe was otherwise a mediocre student, but she excelled in writing and contributed to the school newspaper. Monroe returned to live with the Goddards in Van Nuys in either the late 1940 or early 1941, due to the elderly Lower’s health issues.
After graduating from Emerson, she began attending Van Nuys High School. Doc Goddard was relocated him to West Virginia In early 1942 by the company that employed him. California child protection laws prevented the Goddards from taking Monroe out of state, and she faced the possibility of having to return to the orphanage. She had been reared by 12 successive sets of foster parents and, for a time, in an orphanage.
So to keep from returning to the orphanage, as a solution, she married their neighbors son, 21-year-old factory worker James “Jim” Dougherty on June 19, 1942, just after her 16th birthday. Monroe subsequently dropped out of high school and became a housewife, she later stated that the “marriage didn’t make me sad, but it didn’t make me happy, either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom.”
In 1943, Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marine and was stationed on Santa Catalina Island, where Monroe moved with him. In April 1944, Jim Dougherty was shipped out to the Pacific; he would remain there for most of the next two years. Monroe moved in with his parents and began a job at the Radioplane Munitions Factory in Van Nuys.
In late 1944, she met photographer David Conover, who had been sent by the U.S. Army Air Forces’ First Motion Picture Unit to the factory to shoot morale-boosting pictures of female workers. Although none of her pictures were used, she quit working at the factory in January 1945 and began modeling for Conover and his friends. Defying her deployed husband, she moved on her own and signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency in August 1945.
Marilyn Monroe’s Entrance into Modeling and Acting
As a model, Monroe occasionally used the name Jean Norman. She straightened her curly brunette hair and dyed it blonde to make her more employable. Her figure was deemed more suitable for pin-up than fashion modeling, and she was featured mostly in advertisements and men’s magazines.
The agency’s owner, Emmeline Snively, said that Monroe was one of its most ambitious and hard-working models. By early 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers for publications such as Pageant, U.S. Camera, Laff, and Peek.
Monroe received a contract with an acting agency in June 1946. After an unsuccessful interview at Paramount Pictures, she was given a screen-test by Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox executive. Head executive Darryl F. Zanuck was unenthusiastic about it, but he was persuaded to give her a standard six-month contract to avoid her being signed by rival studio RKO Pictures. Monroe’s contract began in August 1946, and she and Lyon selected the stage name “Marilyn Monroe”.
The first name was picked by Lyon, who was reminded of Broadway star Marilyn Miller; the last was picked by Monroe after her mother’s maiden name. In September 1946, she divorced Dougherty, who was against her working. Marilyn married two more times. Joe DiMaggio in 1956 and Arthur Miller in 1959.
Marilyn Monroe’s some 28 movies made:
- Dangerous Years (1947)
- Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948)
- Ladies of the Chorus (1948)
- Love Happy (1949)
- A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950)
- The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
- All About Eve (1950)
- The Fireball (1950)
- Right Cross (1951)
- Home Town Story (1951)
- As Young as You Feel (1951)
- Love Nest (1951)
- Let’s Make It Legal (1951)
- Clash by Night (1952)
- We’re Not Married! (1952)
- Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)
- Monkey Business (1952)
- O. Henry’s Full House (1952)
- Niagara (1953)
- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
- How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
- River of No Return (1954)
- There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954)
- The Seven Year Itch (1955)
- Bus Stop (1956)
- The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)
- Some Like It Hot and The Misfits
In their first runs, Monroe’s 23 movies grossed a total of more than $200 million, and her fame surpassed that of any other entertainer of her time. Her early image as a dumb and seductive blonde gave way in later years to the tragic figure of a sensitive and insecure woman unable to escape the pressures of Hollywood.
Her vulnerability and sensuousness combined with her needless death eventually raised her to the status of an American cultural icon. It is noted to say that her 23 movies that grossed more than 200 million was far more money than now, 2019, where money is now worth say 10 times that or more.
Marilyn Asked Joe DiMaggio for Help Just Before Her Death
Joe DiMaggio got a warning supposedly from Marilyn that she was in big trouble, and he phoned Frank Sinatra, but Sinatra tole DiMaggio don’t get involved. Sinatra’s comment brings up some questions on what he knew.
Why did Joe DiMaggio phone Frank Sinatra if he knew Marilyn was in trouble. At 4:25 am., the Los Angeles Police Department was notified, but noted both the forensic work and the police investigations were hopelessly flawed, why?
As We Say Goodbye to Marilyn, We Remember Her Last Hours
Witnesses claim to have heard a disturbing tape, from the bugged Monroe home the night of her death, on which the voices of Lawford, an angry Bobby Kennedy and a screaming Monroe are audible.
More questions, who bugged the home?
The former live-in housekeeper, Eunice Murray said she heard Bobby Kennedy’s voice in Marilyn’s bedroom. How did Lawford and Robert Kennedy get into Marilyn’s bedroom? Eunice Murray didn’t say they came in the front door. The only alternative they came in through the window. Did Marilyn let them in?
She was found in bed with a phone and naked, how did that come about? This is more of the mystery surrounding her death. Was She forced to take the overdose of barbiturate’s as a cover up, but killed with the ingestion of oxygen into her body through a needle between her pubic hairs as Johnny Russo claims, which was revealed in the interview with Doctor Michael Savage?
The murder no doubt was planned in advanced, then carried out if needed.
The going to the press voiced by Marilyn ended her short time on earth, this tragic figure of a naive, sensitive and insecure woman, caught up and unable to escape the pressures of her famous photos and admiring movies, health problems at only 36. The wonder is where would she be at an older age?
Her vulnerability and sensuousness combined needless death, raised her to the status of an American legend icon. Through her famous photographic figure, face photographed with mouth wide opened square lips revealing white gleaming teeth) with her command presence, Marilyn will always remain in our hearts and memory.